Burt is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts. He has been covering the IT industry for almost two decades, including a long stint as a writer and editor for eWEEK. Over the past several years, he also has written and edited for The Next Platform, Channel Partners, Channel Futures, Security Now, Data Center Knowledge, ITPro Today and Channelnomics.

A Chinese advanced persistent threat group dubbed "Thrip" has attacked at least 12 organizations in Southeast Asia since being exposed last year, Symantec researchers say. The group appears to be linked to Billbug, another Chinese APT group that has been around for a decade.

An emerging cyber espionage group that apparently started its work in South Africa last year is now focusing on targeting critical control systems for oil and gas companies in the Middle East, according to researchers at two cybersecurity firms.

Chinese advanced persistent threat groups are targeting cancer research organizations across the globe with the goal of stealing their work and using it to help the country address growing cancer rates among its population, according to researchers at cybersecurity company FireEye.

"Silence," a Russian-speaking criminal group that has stolen $4.2 million from ATMs and financial institutions since 2016, has become more active this year, using new tools and tactics in its attacks and expanding its reach globally, according to the security firm Group-IB.

The group behind the Cloud Atlas cyber espionage campaigns, which were first detected five years ago, is now deploying polymorphic techniques designed to avoid monitoring and detection, according to researchers at Kaspersky Lab.

FIN8, a hacker group that targeted POS devices in the hospitality and retail sectors, is back on the scene with new malware, including the Badhatch backdoor that's designed to steal payment card data, according to researchers with Gigamon's threat detection unit.

Weeks after Microsoft issued a patch for the BlueKeep vulnerability, which threatens devices running older versions of Windows, many organizations worldwide have yet to install patches despite alerts from the software giant, government agencies and cybersecurity companies, according to researchers at BitSight.